And the rains came…………….

20 Aug And the rains came…………….

It rained, and rained, and rained, and hailed, and thundered, and rained some more. This past weekend was the wettest UTE Cup I’ve been too! Our motorcycle club – RMTA – held the 38th Annual UTE Cup at Rainbow Trail/Hayden Creek on Aug 16 & 17th. I think “Rainbow Trail” is a really appropriate name for the area – you know, rainbows come after the rain. Anyhow, as usual I was doing signup and scoring with some other regular helpers. Sign up opened on Friday afternoon and after a couple of hours, in the rain, and only a few folks signing up, we moved sign up to our trailer about 3 miles down the road in Cutty’s Resort Campground. Had more people sign up there than on site. BTW, I wasn’t impressed with Cutty’s – they seemed to be less friendly than the last time we stayed there.

Come Saturday morning we prepared for a wet event. All day long it rained and hailed off and on. We started getting rivers of water in the pits and through the scoring “tent” – at least we did have an EasyUp. Riders brought in score cards that were so wet we couldn’t write the scores on them. We ran out of paper towels and dry cloth towels to wipe the cards with. It rained so much we couldn’t write the scores on the score boards. DH and I spent Saturday evening drying cards with my hair dryer (yes – I antied up for full hookups & am glad I did). We ended up listing all the riders with their scores on paper instead. The laminated, weather proof score cards were coming apart. And then it stormed hard between 10 pm and about 3 am making sleeping impossible in an aluminum skinned trailer.

Sunday – repeat of Saturday. One of our scoring crew, Evelyn, took the scoreboards back to her rig to dry them with a hairdryer – she keep popping fuses but did get the boards dry enough to write on. By the end of the weekend we had moved our scoring EasyUp three times to try to get out of the “rivers”. We did get through it all, most riders finished and awards were presented at the end of Sunday’s ride. Congrats to Bailey, winner of this year’s UTE Cup and a local up & coming rider. Watch for him on the national scene.

I had taken a couple of knitting projects with me thinking that I could work on them during our “slow” times – but no, it never stopped raining enough to be knitting outside. And evenings were spent trying to get things dried out for the next day.

What was good about this event – well, I got to ride my birthday present new “bike”, a Honda Ruckus, between the pits & our trailer. Ok yes, it’s only 49 ccs but it’s fun, and cute, and has a place under the seat to carry things. Lots of people were having fun taking it for a spin, even in the rain. We got to see some friends we haven’t seen for a long time since they moved out of state. Got to see other friends we only get to see at the UTE Cup or national events. We learned that the some forest service folks aren’t so bad – they helped us build a campfire on Saturday (hope no one is in trouble over that). I think they felt sorry for us.

Now we’ve got to get the trailer dry – with all the rain and moisture from clothes we had condensate dripping off vent & window frames. Full hook ups don’t include propane to run your heater so you’ve only got the trailer tanks which will empty pretty quick if you run the heater on high all the time. There are clothes & gear to get the mud out of, clean out the trailer, get the event results into Excel and posted on the club’s web site and get back to normal schedules. And get back to my knitting~

Cheers! Jean